19 May 2010

For a while, the only thing the two skanky, spoiled, excruciatingly obnoxious American princesses (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) charge-carding through Germany in The Human Centipede have to worry about is the alarming number of clichés in which they're mired: they’ve been invited to a party by a stranger (this is how tourists end up in hostile hostels!); they’re lost in the woods; the car has a flat tire; they don’t have cell phone service; it’s raining; a pervy geezer is harassing them; and they’ve ended up on the porch of an isolated house, asking the Walkenesque madman who lives there if they can—oh, brother—use his phone.

It would seem easy to see where this is going, but that’s the one trick The Human Centipede has up its sleeve. Writer-director Six uses this long string of clichés to provide a false sense of security-in-predictability from which he can violently wrest the audience by revealing the homeowner’s mad intention. You get what the title promises: this misanthrope with an eerie reptilian grimace, like the Lugosi villain from an Ed Wood movie, is the world’s premiere Siamese Twins-separator (he’s played by Dieter Laser, who could be the next Christoph Waltz if he found more respectable material); now retired, he’s consumed with a desire to do the opposite: to sew mouths to anuses, creating one creature with a united gastric system. A (gulp) human centipede.

That roofie in the girls’ water glass isn’t for rape, then, and his intention isn’t murder. Truly, it’s a fate worse than death. And thus Six fashions a darkly comic twist on the horror movie, in which survival is never at stake and that’s what’s so frightening. Death would be a gift, or at least preferable to remaining conscious but unable to speak, forced, literally, to eat shit. Unfortunately, The Human Centipede—though in this installment, it never gets past dodecapede; in the upcoming sequel, it should double (vigintiquadripede?)—has nothing to say beyond this one joke, even though all the nationalities at play (the head is Japanese, the middle and tail are American, and the mad scientist a Kraut) would seem to hint at something else, something WWII-y perhaps. They’re not, though, and as it becomes clearer that the movie has nothing to say and thus nowhere to go, it becomes a slog to wait for it to wrap up. There are no more surprises after that second act shocker. The violence here might be more suggested than the literal bloodsoakings of the American franchises (andFrenchstandalones) it sends up, like Saw and Hostel. But at least those torture porners have potent political subtexts, which I’d take over tastefully depicted brutality any day. Grade: C+

18 May 2010

Josh Safdie's features probe New York City privilege. His unappreciated 2008 debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, looked at the gentrifier's sense of revanchist entitlement through a klepto-hipsterette, whose pathological purse-snatching served as a microcosmic form of her broader crime--"stealing" a city. The latest, Daddy Longlegs, a little older and wiser, also explores such issues of race and class, but zeroes in on the arrogance of parents, especially the Park Slope-ish kind. The conspicuously autobiographical film, co-directed by Josh's brother Ben, doubles as a portrait of disillusionment, of two kids recognizing that their fun-loving father isn't so fun after all.

04 May 2010

Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is a faithful adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 eponymous source novel—a little too faithful. It suffers from Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road Problem: like Richard Yates’ portrait of a Mad Men marriage’s dissolution, Thompson’s violent, sexy, and violent-sex-heavy roman noir classic isn’t prized for its plotting, tight as it may be: it’s the book’s tour-de-force inner monologue that pushes it forward (praised on the book-cover blurb by no less than Stanley Kubrick, a two-time collaborator). Without it, the pulpiness of the story just feels, well, pulpy—and, that Winterbottom slathers the film in snippets of Thompson’s first-person prose only makes matters worse. When faithfulness slips into fealty, it stops paying tribute and begins to offend the spirit of the very work it means to esteem.

Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity concerns an under-construction, underground bunker in Finland that will store nuclear waste; the director shoots what's been built already hauntingly, like it’s the mineshaft in My Bloody Valentine. That’s because this documentary is “A Film For The Future” (as per its subtitle), a cautionary report on what this place is and why it’s so terrible, so that people of the future will never visit it. Of course, it’s unlikely that people 50,000 years into the future will be able to figure out how to play Into Eternity in whatever format in which they discover it, so it becomes gratingly smarmy and pretentious that Madsen (by match light!) continues to address audiences of the future (hope you guys appreciate aughties Eurotrash trip-hop!), and to do so as though they’re retarded. (“Man found fire but could not put fire out, so man…”)

It’s easy to look past the movie’s faults, though, and enjoy its long stretches of slow, poetic beauty...

Writer-director Travis Fine ought to be ashamed of himself: not at all because he’s created another vehicle to spotlight the talents of Melissa Leo—who garnered a deserved Special Jury Mention for her performance—but because he uses the deaths of thousands of people as a catalyst to Open The Hearts of his contrived characters. Leo stars as a crusty, alcoholic flight attendant (with horrible taste in music) in charge of an unaccompanied Muslim minor (Anthony Keyvan); when the plane is grounded because it’s September Fucking Eleventh, plane movie becomes road movie as she chaperones him back to NY—by bus, until they’re kicked off for Racism! Directed At Children!, and then by used car—to look for his father, who worked at Windows on the World. They will also make a pit stop so she can deal with her own family issues, where there will be more Racism! Directed at Children! “We’re stuck together, whether we like it or not,” Leo is actually forced to say.

Will this miserable woman-on-the-run and this scared, sensitive kid have anything to teach each other? Will they…form some sort of mutually enlightening and educational bond? You bet! As long as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing have something to say about it!